Welcome you all to the
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica. As of July 1, 2006 it
will mark the beginning of the ninth and final year of my last term as Director.
The Institute has risen to its current state through considerable effort
put forth by its faculty members and research engineers under the auspices
of the distinguished members of its Advisory Committee and continuous support
from the Academia Sinica. We conduct basic research in the core areas of
information science as well as develop cutting-edge information technologies
and advanced application-driven information systems. We adhere to quality,
take great pride in our work and emphasize teamwork spirit in our working
environment. I had the honor of getting elected Member of the Academia Sinica
in 2004, joining this elite group of distinguished scholars in Taiwan and
abroad. Our faculty members have won recognitions such as the Fellow of ACM,
Fellow of IEEE, Academia Sinica Long-Term Researcher Award, Academia Sinica
Outstanding Young Investigator Award, NSC Meritorious Research Fellow Award,
NSC Outstanding Research Award, Ta-You Wu Memorial Award, ACM Taipei/Taiwan
Chapter Kuo-Ting Li Young Researcher Award, Information Science Honorary
Medal, Ten Most Outstanding Young Women Award, Outstanding Research Award
of Pan Wen-Yuan Foundation, National Innovative Invention Award, etc. Let
me give a brief account of what we have accomplished to date.

We have developed over the years an infrastructure for
Chinese language processing which includes part-of-speech tagged corpora,
tree-banks, Chinese lexical database, Chinese grammars, InfoMap, word identification
systems, sentence parsers, etc. The infrastructure provides a suite of indispensable
tools for automatic language understanding and knowledge extraction. These
linguistic resources and processing technologies are open to the public and
well known worldwide. For instance, the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus containing
five million words, which is the first balanced Chinese corpus with part-of-speech
tagging, is available to the research community at http://www.sinica.edu.tw/SinicaCorpus/.
The detailed descriptions for other resources can be found at http://rocling.iis.sinica.edu.tw/CKIP/
. We have also obtained new machine learning methods and applied them to
improve various aspects of document analysis and recognition, including video
caption recognition, handwritten character recognition, binarization of document
images with non-uniform luminance, document layout analysis, etc. The machine
learning methods can be used in other research areas and some of these techniques
have been transferred to business sector. Our Chinese input system--GOING,
which automatically translates a sequence of phonetic symbols into characters
with a hit ratio close to 96%, is widely used in Taiwan. This system, which
has basically solved the problem of typing Chinese on the computer, received
the Distinguished Chinese Information Product Award in 1993. We have applied
our natural language understanding model to Internet intelligent agents.
With intelligent and friendly human-computer interfaces, these software agents
can play the roles of spokesperson for companies on the Internet. These interface
agents will become indispensable in the semantic search engine and the electronic
commerce on the Internet. We have developed a screen recording and broadcasting
system to record lectures held at IIS, which has evolved into a P2P version
to facilitate group collaborations across Internet; a prototype of a digital
library and a scalable full-text search engine and an Internet advertisement
service system which delivers more than 10,000,000 banner advertisements
per day ( http://www.yam.com/ ), and an automatic Internet document classification
and management prototype. The application software has been in operation
and some of them successfully transferred to industry. A web-based collaboratory
( http://webcollab.iis.sinica.edu.tw ) that supports different levels of
collaboration is developed by incorporating the Zope/Plone shareware with
clustering and mirroring features. The ShareTone Web Allies is used not only
as an excellent knowledge management portal with the support of an ontology,
but also as an online communication vehicle with a tele-conferencing system,
and for synchronous collaboration with a suite of CSCW applications. To help
protect intellectual property rights of digital media we have developed a
digital watermarking technique and a digital rights management system. The
watermarking technology, which won the 2004 National Innovative Invention
Award, has been granted US, Canada and Taiwan patents. We have also developed
an augmented panorama system that allows for integration of image-based objects
into panoramas, and successfully transferred to the National Palace Museum
and used for virtual exhibition of 3D artifacts.

We actively engage in cross-disciplinary research such
as bioinformatics, and digital libraries, archives and museums, and in national-scale
projects such as Open Source Software Foundry (OSSF), and Taiwan Information
Security Center (TWISC). Through OSSF we hope to provide a common ground
to foster development of free and open source software, promote interaction
and collaboration between software development communities and private sector,
create a free software sharing environment of benefit to all, and establish
a solid foundation for free software development in Taiwan. TWISC on the
other hand is an integrated effort, collaborating with research universities,
to boost research and development activities in information security, to
promote public awareness and foster partnership among government, academia
and private sector in information security.

We envision ourselves to be in a forefront position
in information science both in Taiwan and abroad, and we all share a common
goal of making substantial impacts and contributions to the society and mankind
for all. We would welcome your visit and appreciate your comments and suggestions.